Ferry Woman's History of the World

Beryl Baigent is a poet; her published collections include Absorbing the
Dark, Hiraeth: In Search of Celtic Origins, Triptych: Virgins, Victims,
Votives, and Mystic Animals.

Cover notes describe this book as both a long poem and a novel. With its
three defined sections, it could also be seen as a Celtic triad of short
stories. Essentially, though, it is none of these: Susan Andrews Grace
is offering the reader the wholeness of chaos, from which one must find
one’s own yin and yang. Ferry Woman is on a watery course through a
new history of the world—history from a woman’s perspective.

In her essay “Immanent Mother,” poet/artist Meinrad Craighead
writes, “[m]y Mother is water and she is inside me and I am in the
water.” Thus the detail matters little. Susan Andrews Grace escapes
the linearity of her tool (a book) by sailing around and within her
characters, the countries she has visited, and her philosophy of life.
Like Ferry Woman, in her knitting metaphor, she is “[c]asting on /
round and round.”

In “The Book of Gilliosa,” we meet the multiple voices of an
omniscient narrator and of Gilly, her mother, her brothers, and her
sisters. We are introduced to the “loose raggedy knitting” of Ferry
Woman (a pattern that becomes her voice). Her barge is created from
knitted planks of pinewood, and she ferries Gilliosa between worlds to
meet two other matriarchs (Mary and Nesta, “mother to all Norman
Irish”) with whom she constitutes the Trinity. We experience Gilly
serving, suffering, falling (into love), and floundering (into
responsibility). In “Ferry Woman: A Book of Authority,” the persona
is found bending “[a]s if she were the sea,” while Gilly “ponders
the male God” and learns her catechisms with some dissension.

However, she also prays to Ferry Woman, who will “stitch [her] a
way” ... “bringing comfort, ease.” The final section is titled
“The Book of Fitzgerald.” Fitzgerald is Gilliosa’s family name,
and we find her researching “her noble [Norman] ancestors” in the
UBC library. This section is more narrative-driven than the earlier
books, with its details of immigration in 1847 and the dispatch of Irish
children to families in Quebec. Yet there are also meetings with
“pretty boy” Jesus and with Mary Magdalene “[g]reat with child,”
as well as a set of temptations for Gilliosa to experience before she
reaches “Home.” Following the three books is an explicit afterword
in which the poet tells us of her personal encounters with Ferry Woman.
This essay may have served better as a foreword, giving the reader
smoother access to the work; presumably, though, access is not the
point.